About the Book
Winner of the 2015 Northeastern Minnesota Book Award for Poetry
Lynette Reini-Grandell's long-anticipated debut collection of poetry quickens with forward movement, be it in a car that pushes towards the stars--or with a horse that suddenly spooks, leaving the speaker "knocked down, / breathless, / turning to the sight of a thousand-pound horse / rushing the gate / and leaping over my head." Several of the poems probe the experience of her grandparents who emigrated from Finland and settled on a farm in northern Minnesota in the early twentieth century. The urge to move forward is matched with a deep love and reverence for creatures living in their natural world, for the buzz of the city, for unmet ancestors and kindred spirits, and most especially for her transgender husband.
Approaching the Gate
Peel back the feathers, peel back the fur.
The pale, protective skin--peel that away too.
Pull apart anything that covers,
scrape away whatever doesn't fit.
Let light stream in at the speed of blood,
slice past cornea, sclera, iris, retina.
Anything to fell the green-leaved past
and pave a roadway,
anything to get to the inside,
anything to plow this ground under.
Lynette Reini-Grandell's poetry has received grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Finlandia Foundation. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is part of an art installation in room 5D of the Carlton Arms Hotel in Manhattan. In Minneapolis, she reads regularly with the Bosso Poetry Company, a subsidiary of Bosso Enterprises, theoretically based in Big Lever, Wyoming.
About the Author :
Lynette Reini-Grandell has published her work in Ache, Evergreen Chronicles, Poetry Motel, and on MNArtists.org. Her poem "Radio Girls" appears in the anthology It's Animal but Merciful and was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize. She is the recipient of a 2011 Minnesota State Arts Board grant for poetry, a 2010 What Light Poetry award winner, received a 2009 Intermedia Arts Writer-to-Writer Mentorship, won the 2003 SASE/Ache prize for fiction, and edited Rifle Sport Alternative Art Gallery's only literary journal, Magazine. Her poetry is on the walls of the Carlton Arms Hotel in Manhattan, in an installation created with her husband Venus, a transgender artist and musician. A feature-length documentary about their relationship, "Venus of Mars," by Emily Goldberg, has toured film festivals around the world. More information about the documentary can be found at venusofmars.com.
She has performed poetry and fiction at countless spoken word venues, among them Intermedia Arts, Patrick's Cabaret, Kieran's, the Turf Club, the Poetry Café (London), Cacophony Chorus, the Love Ugly, Ricochet Kitchen, Soul Invictus (Phoenix), El-Chango (Bisbee), and the Minnesota State Fair. She appears regularly with the Bosso Poetry Company and is on J. Otis Powell's CD, Theology: Love and Revolution. When not reading, she accompanies other writers and burlesque performers on jazz violin.
She co-hosts "Write on Radio," on KFAI (kfai.org), a radio show interviewing local and national writers about their work.
Lynette Reini-Grandell holds a B.A. from Carleton College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation is titled "The Modern Sound: American Poetry and the Rise of the Recording Industry, 1920-1940."
She is an English professor at Normandale Community College, sings in a church choir, and has been variously vice president, president, past president of the Minnesota Council of Teachers of English.
"Approaching the Gate" is her first poetry publication.
Review :
"The poems in Lynette Reini-Grandell's first collection take root in personal experience and branch outward into the universal. The speaker in these poems seeks an identity through the exploration of history (personal, familial, and ancestral), the surrounding natural world, and the emotional complexities of a relationship that blurs our gendered lenses. 'If you are ravishing, then who will come / to ravish me?' By turning an ever-questioning eye and searching mind toward the exterior, we delve deeper into the mysteries of the interior. 'Everything follows / a current, a trace. / Every tree / whorls toward its stem.' Revelatory and authentic, the poems in Approaching the Gate reveal a psyche and a world always in the process of redefinition."--Matt Rasmussen, author of Black Aperture, National Book Award Finalist "The ghosts of fairy tales live in these pages and color their deceptively simple surfaces, as Lynette Reini-Grandell artfully blends meditation, history, and the risk inherent in love into poetic form. The fundament of these poems is the earth that nurtures and buries us, that supports farms and horses and trees and fire and wine. As in fairy tale, it is the generosity of human spirit in the face of difficulties that tentatively and momentarily and brightly distinguishes us. The pleasures that await the reader of this volume are physical, unsparing, and profound."--Sidney Wade, author of Straits & Narrows: Poems
"What is the gate that Lynette Reini-Grandell's poetry takes us toward? It could be heaven, or hell, or somehow both. In some poems we are going toward that which bars us from loving each other, rejoicing when that gate finally opens. In other poems we head toward a gate of suffering, learning thereby the need to bear witness to what harm is done. In these sharply-etched, intimate songs we follow a poet over 'the contours of the curving world, ' and approach whatever gates await us buoyed by a sense that words like these will see us through."--Fred Marchant, author of The Looking House
"Lynette Reini-Grandell's first collection, Approaching the Gate, is a rich blend of star dust, music, memory--and horses, lots of horses. This is a poet who loves the world and gives herself entirely to the moment: 'we work together, / we put away the dead, / we burn with forward movement' she says. Reini-Grandell manages to take us from atomic dust to quantum love with the assuredness of a rider who knows when to reign in and when to let the poem have its way. 'I want to sense the kindling in all things, / to join the whirling dancers on the stage, ' she says in 'To Change the World, ' and she does."--Joyce Sutphen, Minnesota State Poet Laureate, author of After Words
"Approaching the Gates is ganged with love and its many conflicting faces and bodies--human, celestial, animal. Love is the subject of this book--love's difficulties, and dreams and longing to be unburdened of the beauty of life dreaming its many faces, bodies, and days--all the while, in love with even love's impossibility, without which there (as the poet illuminates) can be no miracles. I love this debut book full of miracles where 'even the vegetables sing.'"--Ed Bok Lee, author of Whorled
"In Lynette Reini-Grandell's new collection of poems she writes in the title poem: 'Pull apart anything that covers/scrape away whatever doesn't fit.' The truth is, everything in this beautiful collection fits. We would feel the loss if any single poem suddenly vanished. In this book there's room for love, discord, sorrow, history, loneliness, transformation, the sensuous, horses exactly as themselves, and as guides of the spirit, nature, and all its creatures, surprising leaps of image and intention--a bounty. The poet asks, 'Will there ever be/another world/like this one?' No, not really. This is Lynette Reini-Grandell's world, and we are fortunate to live it inside these poems of hers. In the first poem of this collection, the poet writes, 'I can drive, let me do this much./Let me watch the road.' Yes. Let her drive, and watch the world for us."--Deborah Keenan, author of From Tiger to Prayer, and she so had the world
